MAP30: The Gateway of Hell (The Plutonia Experiment)

MAP30: The Gateway to Hell is the thirtieth and final map of The Plutonia Experiment. It was designed by Milo Casali and uses the music track "The End of DOOM", the music from Doom's text screens.

Overview
The Gateway of Hell is one of the three official Doom IWAD levels where the Icon of Sin appears. In the Plutonia Experiment, the monster is known as the Gatekeeper and is protected by a cyberdemon.

A separate deathmatch area exists outside the main map.

Essentials
Pick up all the goodies in the starting room and jump down the bloodfall. The bloody floor is not damaging, so feel free to walk on it. Pick up the BFG9000 on a platform in the middle of the room. Go towards the opening in the wall.

You will be teleported to an area with pillars and arch-viles in them. Go straight forward and the wall in front of you will lower revealing some lost souls. The Gatekeeper is covered and protected by a cyberdemon, which you need to kill.

Drop into the circular pit in front of the cyberdemon. Use the switch on the right. Then use the switch to the left which will lower the pillar in the middle of the circle. Wait until the pillar is nearly at the top and fire a rocket into the brain of the now unguarded Gatekeeper. Fire at least three rockets at the brain, just like in Doom II. The monsters around you may be ignored for the most part.

Other points of interest
If any of the spawn shooter cubes spawn a monster at the player's coordinates, the player will be killed by means of a telefrag. This will happen even if the player is invincible by means of cheats or powerups.

Official
There are no official secrets in this level.

Non-official

 * 1) Just like in Doom II MAP30: Icon of Sin, you can use the  cheat code to enter the boss brain area, though it does not count as a secret.
 * 2) Similarly to the "secret" above, you can use the  cheat code and look around. After a while, you should find several dark rooms, all containing a weapon of some sort.

Bugs
The two first cases apply to the Icon of Sin and are thus true in any level that has one.
 * If the player remains in the level for a long period of time after being detected by the monster spawner without killing any monsters, the level will fill up with monsters. If many monsters populate the level, it can cause a possible crash due to the nature of the Gatekeeper that endlessly fires its spawn shooter cubes that turn into monsters when reaching any given surface. The possible crash occurs when the number of living monsters exceed the limitations.


 * Savegames have specific problems in the level. If the player saves a game after having woken up the final boss, quits the program and then returns to load the savegame, a Venetian blind crash will occur. A detailed explanation can be read here.


 * In the deathmatch area, in the lowest part of the automap in the area with the stairs, it is possible to get stuck behind one of the corpses.


 * Some items are in the deathmatch area of the map, that cannot be accessed without the cheat: all five berserk packs and one of the three megaspheres. So it is not possible to obtain 100% of the items. Some weapons are affected too, see the table below.

Speedrunning
As this level does not contain official secrets, the NM 100S category is redundant.

Current Compet-n records
The Compet-n records for the map are:

The data was last verified in its entirety on July 6, 2020.

Current DSDA records
The records for the map at the Doom Speed Demo Archive are:

The data was last verified in its entirety on November 22, 2022.

Deathmatch
This level includes its own, separate deathmatch arena.

Player spawns
This arena contains eight spawn points:
 * 1) facing south. (thing 209)
 * 2) facing west. (thing 210)
 * 3) facing north. (thing 211)
 * 4) facing north-west. (thing 212)
 * 5) facing south. (thing 213)
 * 6) facing north. (thing 214)
 * 7) facing west. (thing 247)
 * 8) facing east. (thing 248)

Things
The following things (per skill level) are placed in the arena:

Things
This level contains the following numbers of things per skill level:

Trivia

 * This is one of the three levels of Plutonia that contains the same number of monsters and objects regardless of the selected skill level, with the exception of an extra multiplayer-only cube shooter on UV and NM skill levels, as well as 19 additional spawn targets. The other levels are MAP21 and MAP32.